Just wanted to put a quick note up here to explain my lack of posts since May. I’m suffering from some sort of extended illness that’s causing me massive, life-altering fatigue in the middle of a period in which there is much to be done at work. My apologies for my absence from this endeavor.

So far they’ve determined that I do not have mononucleosis, my blood sugar levels are fine, and there’s nothing amiss with my thyroid. I have an appointment with an endocrinologist on August 10th (happy birthday, Francesca!) and will be seeing a GP soon to do more evaluation.

The good news is that whatever it is, I seem to be slowly improving. I was unable to go to work much of the first week of June, and now I’m slogging through it, though it’s a struggle. I was having tingling in my hands and feet, and that seems to have abated. I was having daily fevers up to 99.1, and now they’re only up to 98.7 or so (an afternoon temp of 98.1 or 98.2 is normal for me – I tend to be in the mid-97s when I get up in the morning). The panic is mostly gone, though I’m still weepy from time to time. Don’t play any U2 song around me, or I Will Certainly Cry. My memory seems to have improved. I feel like I can breathe again most of the time. I still have a weird burning sensation in my right shin. I’m still exhausted when I get up in the morning. I walked half a mile yesterday and had to stop from tiredness – and this from someone who last month was walking 18 miles a week.

Additionally, I’ve been off the Pill for several weeks and off spironolactone for about a week and a half and my skin hasn’t gone haywire. It’s not perfect, but it’s certainly nowhere near the severely broken-out condition it was when I first went to the doctor about it in 2001.

The nurse practitioner I saw at my OB/GYN’s office listened attentively to the whole strange sequence of events and said, “You have a delicate biochemistry, don’t you?” That felt better than the reaction it seems like I usually get from doctors, which is a sort of silent “What a pain – this one’s totally psychosomatic” attitude. Believe me, I do not *enjoy* being the canary in the coalmine – if I could choose to be otherwise, I certainly would.

So the answer so far is no answers. I’ll let you know when I know more.

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3 Responses to Letting My Public Down

I wish I was around to sing you the Get Well Song.
It goes…
Get well, get well soon
Get well, get well soon
Get well, get well soon
And I hope your bill is small!
I usually sing it when passing by Robert’s Animal Hospital, but I think it applies even if you are not fur-bearing.
Poodle

Hi there..
I guess you might have heard this before.. but I just wanted to mention that your condition looks like a severe deficiency in vitamin B-12.
I’m not a doctor.. I am a vegan and am just aware of the symptoms of deficiency of B-12. One of my friends suffered from it and the symptoms, much like yours but not as severe, got better after doses of B12 vitamin supplements.
Hope that helps. I hope you get better.

Thanks for your concern, Bindu, and for sharing your perspective – I appreciate it. This post is actually more than two years old now, and my symptoms have shifted over time to be different than those listed here. We tested for a wide range of deficiencies, including b12, not long after this post was made, and my doctor was pleased to find out that not only were my values normal, they indicated that my dietary intake was better than average. And as a side note, a shifting constellation of symptoms over time is characteristic of CFS. Additionally, I’m not a pure vegan – I do have a fair bit of dairy sources of b12 in my diet.

Whats’s All This Then?

I’m Jocelyn. I kept this blog before becoming disabled by myalgic encephalomyelitis. That happened in December 2007. I first fell ill in May 2004. I hope someday to cook again.

I live in Washington, PA now; when I was writing this I was living in Fresno, CA.

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I blog vegetarian recipes and occasional marketing snark. Originally from Northern Virginia, I ditched out on an acting degree from NYU because the city’s food stores and greenmarkets were much more interesting.

I spent twelve years in the food industry, as a cheesemonger, tiny cog in a vast major cereal company machine and as a marketing jill-of-all-trades at a produce commodity group.